Playing with Words Through Rhyming

Rhyming prepares children for beginning reading by “playing” with the letter sounds. In order to rhyme, children need to be able to hear the different letter sounds in words and be able to change the beginning sound to make a new word. Poems, nursery rhymes, jump rope jingles… all help make rhyming fun when playing with words.

Rhyming

Rhyming is finding two or more words that have the same ending sound. The words do not necessarily have to end with the same letters. For example, do, you and two rhyme, but have different letter endings.

Read through the story first and then go back and say something like, “I like how this sentence rhymes – town rhymes with down. Let’s see if anything else rhymes.” Continue through the story looking for words that rhyme. The next time you come up with a sentence that rhymes you can say, “The brown cat sat on the…pause” see if your daughter tells you a word that rhymes that would fit. If she says batand the story has hat, praise her. She found a rhyming word, even if it wasn’t the one the author chose.

Jump Rope Chants

Combining movement and chanting a rhyming verse is not only great fun, but is also a great brain exercise. There are numerous chants online, great books available or for the fun of it you can write one with your daughter! All you need is a willingness to be silly. It can be about any topic and it doesn’t even have to make sense, it just has to rhyme! Easy peasy!

Concentration Game
Using our cards PDF or your own, put the cards face down. She can turn over 2 cards, if they rhyme she can keep them. If they don’t rhyme, she must put them back in the same place. Game rules.

Bingo
Make up Bingo cards PDF with rhyming pictures. A way to mix them up so your daughter doesn’t memorize the words on the Bingo card is to tape copies of the rhyming picture cards onto the bingo card, using different picture cards each time you play. Rhyming Bingo

Crossword puzzles
If your daughter is reading, you can make a simple crossword puzzle using graph paper PDF. The clues can be: you wear it and it rhymes with cat.

Own Rhyming Books
Make a book for things that rhyme with color words. Each color has a page where she can draw or cut out pictures from magazines of things that rhyme. Or your daughter can make her own book of her favorite rhymes.

Make your own games using books you have read together.
Make any of the above games using words and pictures from a favorite book or character.

When children begin to rhyme they may say words that are not real words. That’s ok, it’s not about the words it’s about learning to rhyme (saying 2 or more words that have the same ending sound). There was a famous writer that created lots of words that rhymed and weren’t real words. Dr. Suess was his name.